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How Kannada packages meaning
Kannada grammar at a glance
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Common questions about Kannada
What are Kannada's five politeness levels?
Kannada makes finer distinctions of politeness in pronouns than most languages. ನೀನು nīnu is intimate (close family, children, peers). ನೀವು nīvu is polite (default for adults). ತಾವು tāvu is ultra-honorific (elders, gurus, dignitaries; literally 'they' applied to one person). Plus 3rd-person honorific ಅವರು avaru / ಇವರು ivaru. The verb agrees with each level differently.
How is Kannada different from Tamil?
Both are Dravidian and share core SOV agglutinative structure, but Kannada is closer to Telugu than to Tamil in script, vocabulary, and grammatical detail. Tamil has historically resisted Sanskrit loanwords; Kannada has accepted them freely. Pronoun politeness is more graduated in Kannada (5 levels) than Tamil (2). The two languages aren't mutually intelligible despite the shared family.
Does Kannada have grammatical gender?
Kannada has a three-way gender system based on the rational/non-rational split common to South Dravidian: rational masculine (men, gods), rational feminine (women, goddesses), and non-rational (everything else — animals, objects, abstractions). Verbs and pronouns agree. The 3rd-person singular distinguishes ಅವನು avanu (he), ಅವಳು avaḷu (she), ಅದು adu (it). In the plural, masculine and feminine merge.
What script does Kannada use?
Kannada uses its own Brahmic-derived script, ಕನ್ನಡ ಲಿಪಿ (Kannada lipi), closely related to the Telugu script (they evolved together from a common ancestor). The script is alphasyllabic — each character represents a consonant + inherent vowel, with vowel modifications shown by attached marks. Kannada has its own distinct character forms, easily distinguishable from Devanagari, Tamil, and other South Asian scripts.
What's the auxiliary iru doing in Kannada aspect?
iru ('be') is Kannada's main aspect-building tool. The progressive uses the present verbal participle + iru: ಮಾಡುತ್ತಿದ್ದೇನೆ ('I am doing'). The perfective uses the past verbal participle + iru: ಮಾಡಿದ್ದೇನೆ ('I have done'). Tense surfaces on iru while the main verb supplies aspectual content. This compound-verb strategy is shared across Dravidian, but the specific auxiliaries differ by language.
Sources for Kannada
The grammatical descriptions on this page are informed by the following published reference and descriptive grammars. Grammatical facts themselves are not subject to copyright; the scholars who documented them deserve attribution.
- Sridhar, S. N. (1990). Kannada: Descriptive Grammar. London: Routledge.
- Schiffman, Harold F. (1983). A Reference Grammar of Spoken Kannada. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
- Kittel, F. (1903). A Grammar of the Kannada Language in English. Mangalore: Basel Mission Press.
- Krishnamurti, Bhadriraju (2003). The Dravidian Languages. Cambridge University Press.